This Week In Digital…

Joseph Fitzpatrick

Like this to demote your ranking

Like this for a chance to win X, share for a chance to win Y or comment to enter our competition – no doubt your Facebook News Feed is populated by posts like these on a regular basis.

The like/share/comment mechanism of inviting engagement on Facebook could be a thing of the past though as the social media site announced this week that organisations which do this face having their Pages rankings demoted. This is because Facebook believes like-baiting, results in its users being shown content that is not relevant to them.

Facebook product manager Chris Turitzin wrote in a blog post: “Over time, these stories lead to a less enjoyable experience of Facebook since they drown out content from friends and Pages that people really care about.

“The improvement we are making today better detects these stories and helps ensure that they are not shown more prominently in News Feed than more relevant stories from friends and other Pages.”

Facebooks crack down on the manufactured promotion of content this update is not dissimilar to what Google has been attempting over the last few years.

Yahoo slips to all time low in the US

Yahoo now enjoys just a 10.1% share of the US search market, according to the latest figures released by comScore this week. Of course Google remains dominant with 67.5% of the search share while Bing had a negligible increase to 18.6%.

From the Vikings to high-speed broadband

Walled city and home to the Vikings, the Minster and Dick Turpins final resting place, York, is set to be dragged from a city of antiquity to the 21st century and become the digital capital of the UK. That’s because Sky and TalkTalk have clubbed together to give York the country’s fastest broadband speeds.

This will see a state-of-the-art, pure fibre-to-the-premise network built in the city providing broadband speeds of 1 Gigabit. Now if you’re like me and wouldn’t know a Gigabit if it hit you on the head this probably doesn’t mean much – but the CEO of TalkTalk, Dido Harding, does a stellar job of placing the new speed into context: “You could have 200 friends round and all of them could livestream a different movie” she explained.

Worst corporate social gaffe ever?

There have been some pretty awful social media mistakes made by businesses but I think US Airways went straight to the top of this undesirable league table this week with a shocking response to a customer service complaint.

Without going into too much detail the airline responded to a tweet from an unsatisfied customer with an image of the pornographic variety and then left the response online for 22 minutes by which time countless screen grabs and retweets had ensured its immortality. US Airways has since apologised but ruled out sacking the responsible employee claiming that the image had been posted erroneously.

And finally…

A mixed week for Google who put its Google Glass on sale for one day only on Tuesday, but then saw shares plummet on Thursday after posting disappointing profits for the first quarter of the year.